Contents

Background

“The design process involves a systematic and highly rigorous method of developing and critiquing ideas in an iterative process that can produce results that have both practical value and radical implications”[1]

“Design practice in the future will involve not imposing ideas, but instead empowering other people and facilitating their co-creation of the [media,] products and environments we need and can sustain”[1]

This page will be used as an open discussion thread for people interested in exploring questions and issues related to Media, Culture and Technology.

The page will be used to share links to articles, discussion forums, suggested reading and useful media that raise questions about how we understand and work with new and emerging forms of media technology.

Draft Statement

The Media, Culture & Technology SIG is an interdisciplinary group whose aim is to develop and deepen the theoretical understanding of media technology in order both to investigate its relations with culture and society but also enhance and inform its applications through media practice.
The scope of the group is broad in order to encourage collaboration and enhance the cross-pollination of ideas between researchers utilising varied methodological approaches to media technology. As such the group will be a site for fostering interdisciplinary approaches to media. One goal is to provide a home for those researchers who currently reside outside any of the more focussed LMS research groups but also encourage those already within existing groups to explore other perspectives on media and technology.

The group will focus on three main interrelated areas:

Research into the role media technologies play in the co-construction of culture.

This particular focus of the group will be to develop theoretical work on contemporary digital media from a technological perspective. This focus involves understanding technology as an actor that has causal social and cultural effects. This would align the research group with a number of prominent contemporary research areas such as Actor Network Theory, philosophy of technology, digital humanities, post-humanism, mechanology, cultural technologies, big data, media archaeology, control theory (cybernetics), systems theory etc.

Investigate and experiment with the use of technologies for cultural analysis.

The bringing together of technology practitioners with social and cultural theorists creates the opportunity to develop empirical digital research methods. Given the extent to which much contemporary cultural activity occurs online, social and cultural analytics using digital methods is a key tool for research. Such methods would include social network analysis, internet of things, website scraping, issue mapping, mapping proxy servers, hyperlink analysis etc. This kind of empirical research could also lead to the group developing expertise in consultancy and publishing reports into salient issues.

Provide a philosophical and theoretical context for media technology practice as well as interrogating how such practice itself provides a method for developing and challenging ideas.

The group is also interested in exploring how technology practice itself can be understood as a process of critical interrogation related to the field of cultural production. An important strand of the groups work will be to understand and question design and production processes as simultaneously methods for the development of critical thought.

Links

Suggested Reading

Books

Journals

Articles

Suggested Media

Suggested Sites

[1]
Creating Noto for Google
A typeface five years in the making, Google Noto spans more than 100 writing systems, 800 languages, and hundreds of thousands of characters. A collaborative effort between Google and Monotype, the Noto typeface is a truly universal method of communication for billions of people around the world accessing digital content.